Keith Jackson has written to reassure Celtic fans that the club’s hierarchy has a cunning plan in place with Eddie Howe likely to be announced as manager whenever Dermot Desmond decides to rubber-stamp the deal.
The opinion piece is incredibly optimistic and positive with only token coverage given to the 71 days that have been lost since Neil Lennon resigned as manager.
With just two matches to go in the 2020/21 season there are just over two months to go until the first Champions League qualifier of next season and the chance to rake in £30m.
Celtic have only reached the group phase twice in the last seven years despite being seeded throughout the Champions route, next season they go into the League route where they won’t be seeded if they reach the final two rounds.
Soothing away much of the concerns of supporters, Jackson writes in the Daily Record:
The smart money remains heavily stacked on Eddie Howe’s eventual appointment as Lennon’s permanent replacement. The informed word is, it’s only a matter of when Desmond lands his top target as opposed to if.
That does not explain why Howe has held off for so long. Nor does it excuse Celtic’s reluctance to engage with its own supporters. If anything, the longer they are purposely left groping around in the dark, the more fractured the relationship is likely to become. It’s beginning to look like arrogance and blatant disrespect on the part of an under performing, under fire regime.
But, again, this does point to a calculated gamble being made inside the boardroom. Indeed, with season tickets needing to be sold as a matter of absolute urgency, logic dictates they must have something up their sleeve – something special enough to convince them it will back hearts and minds from the moment it is able to be unveiled.
A new manager. A new captain. A contemporary new structure, headed up by a new director of football in charge of recruiting a new first team squad. It’s not as if Lawwell and McKay haven’t worked all of this out for themselves.
Think about it. Why else would they sit there saying nothing for all this time, knowing full well that with each passing day the anger outside is intensifying?
The alternative, of course, is there is no plan. That a man as shrewd and experienced as Lawwell has been doing nothing more than sitting on his hands and counting down the clock until he sneaks off into the sunset at the end of the month under the cover of darkness?
Should Peter Lawwell leave with immediate effect?
Yes, utterly toxic, the rebuild starts when he leaves
No, we need his experience for the handover
Last June, Lawwell gave his only newspaper interview of 2020 to Jackson in the Daily Record, explaining how Celtic hoped to stage a test event for 10,000 fans before the SPFL season kicked off.
Shrewd and experienced aren’t the sort of terms that many Celtic fans would use to describe the final three years of Lawwell’s reign at Celtic.
Soon after the Double Treble of 2018 he failed to conclude the transfer of John McGinn, a former Celtic Season Ticket holder and grandson of a former chairman.
In-between the dramas over McGinn and signing Youssouf Mulumbu Celtic were knocked out of the Champions League qualifiers by AEK Athens and failed to sell Dedryck Boyata.
Since then the club has signed Vakoun Bayo, Marian Shved, Oli Burke, Jeremy Toljan, Moritz Bauer, Hatem Abd Elhamed, Patryk Klimala, Albian Ajeti, Vasilis Barkas, Diego Laxalt, Shane Duffy and Jonjoe Kenny.
Brendan Rodgers was lost, Neil Lennon identified as a suitable replacement and taken more than two months to find a replacement for Lennon. Not many fans about to be asked to renew Season Tickets would describe Lawwell as shrewd. He is experienced but not the sort of experience that you’d crow about applying for a CEO job elsewhere in football.